"The Inconvenient Conscience"

That's the title of this excellent piece by George Cardinal Pell of Australia, published in the May 2005 issue of First Things and now available online. Cardinal Pell writes:

Nearly every theologian would agree with Newman that conscience is “a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator.” But while some see conscience as God’s invitation to embrace His law as free subjects, others see it as a radical call to personal freedom. Indeed, for many people today, the word “conscience” suggests not law at all, but the freedom to judge by our own personal resources and the right to act as we each think best—a rejection, in other words, of the need for morality and creed; a claim that I should be allowed to live as I choose.

Of course, this view is often dressed up with the claim that conscience is a special faculty that speaks to us, rather like an oracle, and it may even be elevated to the status of a doctrine: the “primacy of conscience.” But however it is presented, it stands in contrast to the view that conscience is instead simply the mind thinking practically and morally. We think well when we understand moral principles and apply them in clear and reasonable ways; we think badly when we ignore or reinvent moral principles, or apply them in ambiguous and unreasonable ways. “Good conscience,” in this way of understanding, means a good grasp and a good application of moral truth—for it is the truth that remains primary, the truth that is grasped and applied by the practical mind.

Highly recommended. Cardinal Pell is one of the Church's true intellectuals and a man of courage and holiness, as Tess Livingstone shows so well in her biography of the Cardinal, George Pell: Defender of the Faith Down Under. An IgnatiusInsight.com interview with Livingstone can be read here and an interview with Cardinal Pell is located here.